Biography of John Donne

John Donne was born in 1572, into a financially comfortable family of London Catholics, who experienced the anti-Catholic persecution that ran rampant in Elizabethan England. Donne’s father was an iron-merchant, and his mother was the daughter of John Heywood, writer of epigrams and interludes, and the great-niece of Sir Thomas More.He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge , but did not earn a degree at either institution because he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, which recognized the English monarch as supreme head of the church in England. He studied law and anticipated a political career.

That ambition seemed likely when, following naval expeditions to Spain and the Azores , he was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Donne’s career aspirations fell apart when, in 1601, he secretly married Ann More, Lady Egerton’s seventeen-year-old niece. Donne was dismissed from Egerton’s service, and committed by the bride’s father to Fleet Prison for several weeks. For more than a decade after his release, Donne’s financial position was precarious, especially given the need to support his growing family (his wife would later die from complications following the birth of their twelfth child).

Donne’s writing proved his salvation. His prose work Pseudo-Martyr (1610), which argued that English Catholics could pledge an oath of allegiance to King James but maintain religious loyalty to the Pope, won James’s favor. His three poems on the death of Sir Robert Drury’s daughter Elizabeth— A Funerall Elegie (1610), An Anatomy of the World (1611) and Of the Progress of the Soul (1612)—gained the patronage of Drury’s house.

In 1607, Thomas Morton, chaplain to the Earl of Rutland, had urged Donne to enter into the Anglican clergy. Donne had refused to take orders in 1607, replying that he was unworthy. But King James continued to encourage Donne in the direction of the Church-somewhat forcefully, for in the end he announced that Donne would receive no position or preferment from the King except in the Church. In 1615, Donne took orders and was appointed Royal Chaplain. In 1616, he was made Reader in Divinity at Lincoln ‘s Inn. In 1621 he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s, a post he retained until his death on March 31, 1631. The sermons here collected were delivered between 1615 and 1631. Donne’s last sermon at Court, which was published posthumously under the title Death’s Duell , followed a period of extended illness during which the preacher appears to have been preparing for his own imminent death. That sermon, a consoling meditation on death as a deliverance from the sorrows of this world, takes on the strength of a eulogy for Donne himself, and echoes the final lines of Donne’s “Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness”:

And as to others soules I preach’d thy word,
Be this my Text, my Sermon to mine own,
Therfore that he may raise, the Lord throws down.